Running your own hardware is unfashionable, and for most companies it is the wrong call. It is worth explaining why it is the right one for us.
The honest cost is capital up front, operational responsibility forever, and a class of 3am problems that a managed platform would have absorbed. Anyone telling you self-hosting is simply cheaper is selling something.
What it buys in return is a cost floor we control, data that does not transit a third party by default, and the ability to make ten-year commitments to the people building on top of us — because our own dependency is hardware we own rather than a pricing page that can change.
For a group whose entire premise is durability, that trade is worth making.